Commentary on Franz Alenxander's “Analysis of the Therapeutic Factors in Psychoanalytic Treatment”

Franz Alexander was born in Budapest in 1891. He was the first student of the Berlin Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he was analyzed by Hanns Sachs and later became an assistant in 1921. In 1930, he moved to Chicago, where he was Director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute for twenty-five years. He was prominent in psychoanalytic education (he occupied the first University Chair in Psychoanalysis, and believed that separate psychoanalytic institutes were necessary only until universities would embrace psychoanalysis). He is also known for his desire to put psychoanalysis on a firm scientific basis, and for his early advocacy of systematic research in psychosomatic medicine and in technical modifications of “standard” psychoanalytic psychotherapy. “Analysis of the Therapeutic Factors in Psychoanalytic Treatment,” published in 1950 and largely summarizing work reported in his book with Thomas French (1946), reports some of Alexander's most important contributions to psychoanalytic—or perhaps psychotherapeutic (he did not find the distinction useful)—technique.

Alexander and French made clear that they saw “no essential difference” between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy (1946, p. vii),